For every mother who thinks they're doing a bad job

It's the first relationship the child will have when he or she enters the world and it's the one that defines and shapes us, without even realising it.

No pressure, right?

That's why if anything goes wrong in your adult life you can blame your mother.

Just kidding.

What you can do, however, is look back on your relationship with your mother to try and understand psychological patterns you've developed as a result of it, and figure out how to do the least possible damage to your own child/children.

A child's first relationship is with their mother, which is why it is so important. Image: Getty

In this week's episode of Life Bites, journalist Emmy Kubainski and clinical psychologist Kirstin Bouse explain the "mother wound".

"How the mums experience their own parents and the relationships they had with them...can be really positive or complicated and difficult, but mothers are a big part of the conversation for a lot of people," she explains.

"Often they haven't had a relationship with their mum in the way that they would like.

"They often feel as thought their mothers perception of them hasn't enabled them to grow into the person they ideally could be."

Bouse says it all begins with how our mother's look at us.

Image: Booktopia

"The first person who holds us and stares into our eyes as babies is typically mum," she explains. "If mum is starring consistently with love and curiosity and joy then she's our mirror for how we see ourselves.

"If mum is not looking at us this way, with criticism or confusion or any of those, anger, any of those things, that's where we start to internalise that as well."

Bouse says all mums have bad moments and bad days, and that's okay.

It's what we do most of the time that counts.

"I know that there are times that we stuff up and our children can feel hurt by our stuff ups, but we don't need to be perfect. Typically our relationships with our children are quite resilient," she says, describing typical mothers and perfectly imperfect.

"What we're gunning for when we have children is that we relate to them and engage with them in a certain way so they develop a secure attachment style. People with secure attachment styles have the best outcomes," Bouse says.

From the very first look, a mother sets the standard for her child's relationship with others. Image: Getty

The type of attachment we have with our mothers causes us to develop habits in how we relate to others.

"While habits are really good in terms of exercising and eating well and sleep, when we have only one way of seeing ourselves and it's a negative way, then we only have one way of relating to others and it's not helpful, but it's so automatic and habitual we can't do anything different," she says.

"When we actually have a mother who's been consistently critical we may be highly highly judgmental of ourselves. We tend to internalise her voice."

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